" We did it.
Joe Biden congratulates himself on Wednesday because he kept his promise: the United States has reached the target of 200 million injections of vaccines against Covid-19, and this before the hundredth day of the mandate of the new American president .
This accomplishment has "no equivalent in the world or in previous vaccination efforts in American history," he even boasted.
While a year ago, the country seemed to sink into the crisis by becoming the one with the highest number of deaths linked to the epidemic, it is now ahead of several European countries as well as its neighbor , Canada, in its vaccination campaign.
This success can be explained by the resources allocated to the production of vaccines, and the rate of production which continues to climb in the territory.
"The last administration spent a lot of money and efforts in the development of vaccines, by delegating the load to national health institutes, to agencies, which are apolitical", explains Arnold Monto, professor at the University of Michigan and Chairman of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Vaccine Validation Committee.
Scaling up trials and industrialized vaccination
Thanks to these means, the test phases were amplified, which made it possible to accelerate the validation, and, consequently, the production of the doses. “Without government support, clinical trials had a few thousand test patients. There, we had 40,000 per test. This is huge, ”underlines the epidemiologist, admitting that the United States has been“ lucky ”by funding vaccine trials that have proven to be effective. Another advantage: the United States, like the United Kingdom or Israel, "made agreements quite early" with the companies producing the vaccines, resulting in deliveries earlier than in other countries, according to him.
To deliver them, the fifty states have deployed a quasi-industrialized approach to vaccination, using local health centers, hospitals, pharmacies, but also supermarkets, or by setting up drives, or vaccinodromes sometimes working by night. In recent days, all American adults have been eligible for vaccination, which has even been extended, in some states, to young people of 16 and 17 years old. Result: vaccinations are also carried out in high schools, as explained on the NBC site.
“We learned lessons from the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine between 2009 and 2010. We understood that we had to make the vaccine widely accessible, to give the possibility to a whole bunch of places to vaccinate, in order to reach more people, especially those most at risk ”, had already explained to us Professor Julie Swann, professor of engineering at the University of North Carolina and specialist in the delivery of health products, during the acceleration of the vaccination campaign in March. .
More efficient vaccine production
If the country of more than 300 million inhabitants reached such a proportion of vaccinated people, it is also thanks to the constant progression of the delivery of vaccines by its manufacturers.
Ten days ago, the White House announced that Pfizer and Moderna, between them, were now able to distribute 25 million doses per week.
The two groups, which provide most of the vaccines administered in the country, have even planned to move upmarket to reach 28 million weekly doses.
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"We have made improvements in our production", details Pfizer, "by doubling the size of our batches to improve their yield, by adding new equipment making it possible to triple the number of formulas produced, by adding high-quality packaging lines. speed to speed up shipments, and we increased our supply of raw materials. As of April 20, the pharmaceutical group, which has production sites across the Atlantic and in Europe, explains having delivered 148 million doses in the United States, against 98 million for the European Union.
Despite these efforts, vaccination disparities persist across states. In addition to the possible difficulties of access according to the means of the inhabitants, there is, "in certain States, much more skepticism compared to vaccines", testifies Arnold Monto. "This is all political, those who are not interested in vaccination are those who are more likely to believe rumors about vaccines," he adds. In the United States, several organizations have expressed alarm at the power of disinformation, online, on the Covid-19 epidemic and the effectiveness of vaccines, sometimes linked to conspiracy movements.
Even if he is pleased with his vaccination record, Joe Biden remains, at this stage, vigilant. “If we let our guard down now, this virus will reduce our progress to zero,” he said. Covid-19 infection rates are indeed on the rise in some parts of the country, such as Michigan, pushing contaminations to 63,000 on average over the last seven days. The number of deaths, it remains in decline at the national level, thanks to the immunization of the elderly and the improvement of care.